Left out of the National Narrative: Lithuanian Leftist Feminism as an Embodied Political Alternative

• In Event: Gender and Politics in the Baltic States

Abstract

The proposed paper explores the often marginalized perspective of leftist feminism on post-Independence Lithuanian state building. During the Baltic Way and the national independence movements in the Baltic countries, nations were a “master symbol” associated with Western-oriented progress narratives (Klumbyte, 2012). As Cynthia Enloe has observed, these nation-building narratives and memories on which they are built are often masculinized (2014), and in the case of Lithuania, women’s contribution to state-building has been silenced or excluded (Jureniene and Purvaneckiene, 2022). As such, leftist feminists in Lithuania find themselves in double jeopardy: their class consciousness in the context of a Western-as-free-market-oriented nation state is often associated with Soviet nostalgia, and their emphasis on a radically inclusive society in terms of all racial and gender identities is seen as incongruent with the mainline national narrative, and even portrayed as threatening to the national identity (Glenn, 2020).
Through ethnographic interviews with women who self-identify as leftist feminists and actively participate in Lithuania's social and political sphere, I examine how they understand their role in post-independence Lithuania, especially in the context of threats to national security posed by Russia’s war on Ukraine and by the recent migrant border crisis when migrants from Middle Eastern countries were used as political weapons by the dictatorial regime of Belarus. These crises which present not only immediate and actual threats but also symbolic, rooted in country’s history (Klumbyte, 2022), have (understandably, even if regrettably) heightened the prevalence of nationalist symbols, language, and exclusionary public discourse. Navigating complex terrain, I argue, Lithuanian leftist feminists seek to forge a path, which on the one hand, takes seriously the geopolitical threats to national sovereignty by Russia, and thus use the opportunity to rearticulate left political thought as separate from Soviet communism, and on the other, counters the rise of exclusionary nationalist narrative through practices of radical inclusion. As such, I argue, leftist feminist activists in Lithuania embark of a mission to embody alternative politics that while taking geopolitical threats presented by Russia seriously, models radical inclusion as a means of resisting both exclusionary nationalist narratives in Lithuania, and of Russia’s necropolitics within and outside of its borders.

Short Bio

Grazina Bielousova is an Associate Lecturer in Sociology at University College London's School of Slavonic and Eastern European Studies and a postdoctoral researcher at Vilnius University's Institute for International Relations and Political Studies. She works at the intersections of race, religion and gender in Eastern Europe as well as decolonial and Eastern European thought.

Author

• Grazina Bielousova, UCL School of Slavonic and Eastern European Studies/ VU Institute of International Relations and Political Science